Spencer "Buddy" Medlin, told Sen. Huggins that CCA's prison in his district
needed 930 inmates to break even, the senator recalls.
Sens. Huggins and Gordon worried that the companies might pull out of the
prisons, and neither man thought the state could run them more efficiently
than the companies. In the future, Mississippi might need the extra beds.
By March 24, a Saturday, Mr. Calabrese had left, but Mr. Sage was
planted on the second floor of the statehouse. A conference committee of
three representatives and three senators had convened to set the corrections
budget and deal with the empty beds, which now numbered 2,600. Four of
the six lawmakers had prisons in their districts.
The conferees sat around a U-shaped group of tables in a high-ceilinged
room hung with portraits of former appropriations chairmen, participants
say. Cigar and cigarette smoke floated in the air. Mr. Johnson shuttled in
and out to answer questions, while Mr. Weissinger, the regional prisons'
attorney, waited with Mr. Sage outside.
The conferees spent most of the weekend debating whether to solve the
empty-bed problem by closing part of the state's massive century-old
penitentiary at Parchman in northwest Mississippi. Rep. Coleman of Bolivar
argued against the idea. Some of her constituents work at Parchman, which
is near her district. She opposes companies being in the incarceration
business in the first place, dealing with "human bodies as commodities," as
she puts it.
Sen. Huggins endorsed closing part of Parchman. "Jack [Gordon] and I
went out to dinner with the private prisons, and they're hurting," he recalls
telling the lawmakers. Wackenhut and CCA had bailed the state out of a
tough spot in 1994 by helping get two new prisons up and running quickly,
and they deserved help, he said.
"I haven't had the privilege of going to dinner," Rep. Coleman remembers
firing back, "but I don't think we should close the [Parchman] units." The
debate got loud at times, but finally, the conferees agreed to leave Parchman
intact for now.
They turned to the county-owned regional prisons. The legislators were
inclined to boost these prisons' guaranteed minimum to 230 inmates -- an
idea Mr. Johnson says he didn't like, because it meant moving $8-a-day
prisoners from state facilities to $25-a-day regional prisons. The conferees
accused him of wanting to keep state prisons full, so their budget would look
justified, participants recall. Guilty, he said.
The committee emerged with a bill around noon on Monday, March 26, but
its language was ambiguous. The measure seemed to set a 230-inmate
minimum for the regional prisons, as well as what looked like a 900-inmate
minimum for the Wackenhut and CCA prisons. The bill didn't, however,
explicitly require Mr. Johnson to move any inmates. Rather, it directed his
department merely to "make payments for housing" prisoners according to
the stipulated minimums -- to pay the prisons whether they housed more
inmates or not.